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CHI 2008 Proceedings · Learning Support April 5-10, 2008 · Florence, Italy
This teamwork started a bit chaotically but became more
systematic as students found that loudly calling out the
number of creatures did not work well since the loud noises
tended to “scare” some of the creatures off the screen. The
response to loud noises was especially challenging during
the tagging activities, because the creatures would run too
quickly for students to track and mark. As a result, the
students had a tendency to be quieter during tagging in spite
of their enthusiasm for the highly interactive task.
Interestingly, while the on-screen display afforded
continuous access to environmental conditions, the
requirement of retrieving, applying, and sharing portable
instruments appeared to have a positive impact in drawing
students’ attention to local environmental conditions as the
basis for explanations of habitat adaptations. This was
evidenced most clearly in the third grade intervention,
where the treatment differences allowed a direct
comparison between the use of on-screen temperature and
humidity displays in one class and the use of the portable
simulated thermometers and hygrometers in the other class.
In contrast to the other classes using WallCology, students
in the third grade class using simulated instruments
regularly referenced environmental conditions in their field
guide pages, and out-gained (albeit not statistically
significantly) their counterparts by 11% on a pre/post
transfer item probing the relationship between physical
characteristics and environmental conditions.
An unexpected reaction was the willingness of students to
suspend their disbelief that WallCology was a simulation in
spite of our explicit assertions to the contrary. In one
instance, students were overheard asking construction
workers in a nearby room, who were working on walls and
ceilings, if they “had seen any little bugs running around on
the pipes.” Another student asked, “If they break the wall,
would the bugs come out?” In support of their commitment
to the reality of the phenomena, students even invented
their own explanations as to why the creatures looked “a
little cartoony,” “because they are so small and that's what
happens when you magnify them.”
Granularity of observational loci. The introduction of
mobile portals proved highly popular among the third grade
students, with groups repositioning the portals, on average,
4.1 times per class period over the course of the unit. While
the mobile portals raised interest in the activity, the
variability in creature populations at different sites along a
wall tended to complicate the task of determining creature
counts and interfered with the instructional objective of
tracking populations over time; in all likelihood, this was
simply too much freedom to afford such young learners.
However, the use of the mobile portals did result in several
groups redefining the activity to include the “mapping” of
the distribution of creature types along a wall. While
population variability along a wall was an unintentional
artifact of the probabilistic simulation unrelated to the
instructional goal, the interaction affordance allowed
students to invent new research questions and develop
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operational strategies for achieving those goals, an
important component of authentic inquiry [6].
Learning. Among the seventh grade students, the attempt to
orient students to issues beyond morphology in
differentiating species proved only partially successful.
While students were more strongly oriented toward
physical characteristics in class discussions (“when I get to
behavior I get kind of confused, I lose my confidence”),
their field guides and interviews reflected fairly rich
descriptions of behavior, including reactions to noise and
speed of travel, albeit sometimes attributing relationships
that were not programmed into the simulation (“The [slug]
is scared of the turtle-like thing and that’s’ [why] we think
it never comes out [of] the pipes”). Overall, though,
students did not show improvement on pre-post items
related to the use of behavior as a cue to species
identification.
The more concrete goal of learning population estimation
techniques proved reasonably successful. On an open-ended
item administered before and after the unit, students were
asked to describe two methods of estimating populations
from samples. Reponses were coded on a 10-point scale,
assigning credit for factors including the recognition of the
inability to access or manipulate the full population, the
need for multiple observations over space and/or time,
description of qualitative algorithmic method, and
articulation of quantitative formulae. Mean scores on the
item increase from 4.6/10 (pre-test) to 7.6/10 (post-test),
t(21) = 6.15, p < .001. Post-activity interviews with
students, however, indicated that while students found the
tag-recapture method to have intuitive appeal, and in
several cases could describe and apply the Lincoln-Peterson
formula, none were able to give a strong characterization of
its conceptual motivation.
In the third grade unit transfer tests, students show pre-post
gains in associating some morphological features with
habitat characteristics (e.g., the association of body fur with
colder habitats, pre-test M=.34, post-test M=.56, χ 2 (1) =
4.6, p < .05), but failed to show improvement on more
subtle morphological characteristics. Student ability to
properly sequence insect life cycle stages improved (pre-test
M=.51, post-test M=.82, (χ 2 (1) = 7.9, p < .01), but no gain
was seen on mammalian life cycles (likely due to a ceiling
effect). While students nearly universally correctly identified
the food chain in their field guides, there was no
improvement in their ability to predict the impact of
perturbations in predator or prey populations among
hypothetical populations.
Stances toward science inquiry. Seventh grade students
were administered affective items drawn from the TOSRA
(Test of Science Related Attitudes) instrument [12] to
assess attitudes toward science inquiry. On that test (scaled
Strongly Disagree = -2 through Strongly Agree = +2),
students’ recognition of the need for multiple samples to
increase reliability was evidenced through their responses